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MongoDB 2.6 Improves Open-Source Database Performance

By Sean Michael Kerner

The open-source MongoDB project is out today with its 2.6 release, providing users with new features and enhanced performance.

For existing MongoDB users, Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at MongoDB, told Database Journal that in the general case, the upgrade from MongoDB 2.4 to 2.6 is a binary-compatible drop-in upgrade. Users simply need to shut down the mongod instances and replace them with mongod instances running 2.6. MongoDB also provides complete upgrade notes to help users update to the new version.

Among the new features in MongoDB 2.6 is one called Index Intersection. Stirman said index intersection enables the query planner to use more than one index to resolve a query.

"With index intersection, developers can address more queries with simple indexes and with less upfront index design," Stirman said.

Stirman said that as an example, in a sales reporting application, a product manager might want to identify all customers who have ordered more than a given quantity of a specific part number. Using index intersection, the existing indexes for part number and quantity can be combined (intersected) to optimize the query, rather than requiring a separate compound index. This also results in reduced overhead to the working set size, and more efficient updates.

Text search is getting a boost in MongoDB 2.6. Stirman noted that MongoDB has always provided rich index functionality, including B-tree indexes on any field.

"MongoDB 2.4 introduced text search in beta, and in MongoDB 2.6 we have added functionality such as multi-language documents and integration with the Aggregation Pipeline," Stirman said. "We now consider text search production-ready."

According to the MongoDB 2.6 release notes, the aggregation pipeline "adds the ability to return result sets of any size either by returning a cursor, or optionally writing the output to a collection."

On the commercial front, the MongoDB Management System (MMS) is getting new features as well for backup and recovery. Stirman noted that MMS is available as a cloud service, and on-premises as part of a subscription.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Database Journal and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist